World War 2
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The 1936 Berlin were probably the biggest propaganda tool ever to be created by the Nazi regime, but I won’t go into the details of the actual games. I will focus on 3 people of Jewish descent. Two who survived the war and one who died a few days after the games. In 1935 the…
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It is said that a picture paints a thousand words , and it does, but that also means that sometimes a picture is just to horrible to look at it, for just a glimpse can evoke a thousand emotions. There are so many images of the Holocaust which are just to gruesome to view, However…
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Philip Wallage was born in Groningen on 12 July 1927. He was murdered at Sobibor on 26 March 1943. He was 15 years old upon his death. Rosalien Wallage was born in Groningen on 15 May 1932. She was murdered at Sobibor on 26 March 1943. She reached 10 years of age. Elisabeth Wallage was…
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When you look at the picture above, you may just admire the men participating in physical exercise. You may even want to join them. But the picture is of concentration camp Mauthausen. The Mauthausen main camp operated from the time of the Anschluss, when Austria was united with Nazi Germany on 8 August 1938, to…
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Life is only a sequence of events and accidents, often determined when and where you are born. When I was 15, as a young man in the 1980s in the Netherlands, my main interest was girls and trying to get beer. When Elie Wiesel was 15 and a young man in Romania (or then Hungary)…
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On 29 April 29, 1942, the Nazis announced a new law to further humiliate the Dutch Jews. From 3 May, they had to wear an identification mark—a six-pointed yellow Star of David with the word Jood [Jew] in its centre. The star made it possible to recognize people as Jews on the street. The Nazis…
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This blog only contains 2 pictures. A picture of a broken doll and a picture of some children’s shoes. Both were called pictures of Auschwitz artifacts, now I know the description is not meant disrespectful and was meant with the best intention and perhaps it is the only way to describe them. But the word…
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Dina Pronicheva (born Dina Mironovna Wasserman) was a Jewish actress at the Kyiv Puppet Theatre and one of the very few people—fewer than 30—who survived the mass executions at the Babi Yar ravine. Her detailed testimony remains one of the most significant eyewitness accounts of the atrocity carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen and local…
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This is a fictional letter, but it is a letter I envisage I may have written to Margot, if I had been a friend or schoolmate. Dear Margot, I hope this letter finds you well, though I understand the circumstances surrounding us are far from what any of us could call “well.” It is strange…
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On June 23, 1944, a delegation comprising two representatives from the International Red Cross and one from the Danish Red Cross conducted an inspection of Theresienstadt, accompanied by SS First Lieutenant Karl Rahm, the camp commandant, and one of his deputies. During the visit, the delegations were treated to an opera by Jewish composer Hans…
